Mike Serbinis has joined Indigo.ca as its chief technology officer after a five-year stint with Critical Path Inc. This is a real coup for Indigo as Serbinis is one of the Canada's bright young technology minds. He joined Critical Path and became its CTO after it acquired docSpace - a document management start-up - in 2000 for more than $500-million.

You know those guys who operate carnival rides and ask "do you to go faster?". Well, that's what it is like in the broadband business these days as Videotron Ltee is getting ready to offer 16Mbps service, which is 10x faster than basic DSL and more than five times faster than Rogers's ultra service. The question is who needs 16Mbps broadband? Someone recently suggested that 12Mbps was enough to do everything you ever want to do online. Then again, there were many people who suggested a PC with a 386 processor would do the job as well. If you're a speed freak, then by all means go ahead and sign up. From a bigger picture perspective, Videotron's new service is part of the tiered service approach many broadband service providers are taking to drive subscriber and revenue growth. This lets service providers pursue different customer segments with plans that meet their needs rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. A really good exampel of this strategy is BT, which has plans based on bandwidth and consumption.

There's lot of chatter about Six Apart raising $12-million with lots of VCs salivating over the deal. Is this bubble-like activity? Maybe but at least Six Apart has a service, plenty of users, and a well-known brand. In other words, it's a real business as opposed to an ideas being chased by VCs worried about missing out of the Web 2.0 bonanza. Om Malik wonders about the exit strategy. While IPOs are rare these days, I think he makes a mistake in dismissing Yahoo because Six Apart had a pre-deal valuation of $80-million. Companies like Six Apart, Technorati, deli.icio.us and Memeorandum are being viewed as strategic assets, which means their "value" tends to as much as about brand, users and the role within a portfolio as it does about dollars and cents. In an ideal world, it would interesting to see a merger between Six Apart (the leading blogging platform), Technorati (the leading blog search engine) and FeedBurner (the leading blog-vertising player). It's probably unlikely but a nice thought. In terms of other blog platforms, I wonder how long Wordpress will carry on with getting an injection of cash. As much as Wordpress has cache, it likely needs money to support its growth. I've got a couple Wordpress blogs and one of them All Nortel, All the Time (a hosted version) crapped out this morning. Not good. Not happy.